Cinematic, triumphant, unbeatable: Alisson seizes his moment for Liverpool

Liverpool are fluid. Liverpool are polyvalent. Liverpool press and sit, then strike like jet fighters. Maybe they really are, as Luis Enrique enthused before this game, “a perfect team”. But sometimes, well, sometimes you just need a really good goalkeeper too.

Alisson wasn’t just good here in the conventional sense, bullocking around his area like a giant, yolk-coloured blur making game-saving blocks and dives. He was, as Liverpool defended desperately at times, triumphantly good. This was goalkeeping as an act of performance, goalkeeping as counter-aggression. You really believe you’re going to win this? How much, would you say?

Liverpool’s 1-0 win in Paris will attract the usual labels, most of them tinged with some element of villainy: a heist, a smash-and-grab, a perfectly executed moped-robbery of a first leg away win. But it was also a consequence of having a very, very good player in the key position on the pitch. And not just good, but one of the deep spirit animals of this team, a footballer who just seemed to recognise early on here that, yep, this one was for him, an Alisson day.

On the face of it, the key moment was the move that saw Liverpool win this game, the only goal finished brilliantly by Harvey Elliott with three minutes left. But the moment it became clear they weren’t going to lose came seven minutes earlier. And it was an Alisson moment, the most cinematic of his eight saves on the night.

Désiré Doué had come on a few minutes before. He took the ball on the left, cut inside and bent a shot that seemed to be already in the corner, bulging the net, confirming the narrative of all that PSG pressure. At which point that familiar lemon-yellow shape appeared in shot once again, hurling itself across the goalline, hanging strangely in the Paris air, thrusting an arm up mid-flight and diverting the ball over the crossbar with a slap of the palm.

That was PSG’s 26th shot. Liverpool scored the only goal with their second a few minutes later. It was beautifully executed. And of course even this came from an Allison moment, a long pass sent in a howling arc towards one of Arne Slot’s late subs, Darwin Núñez.

This was also a good moment for Núñez, and for the manager’s happy habit of affecting games late on. First Núñez claimed the ball, bouncing Marquinhos out of the way, hooves rearing, before finding Elliott’s run down the right with a nicely weighted pass.

View image in fullscreen Alisson stretches to deny PSG yet again. Photograph: Aurélien Morissard/AP

Even as Elliott approached the ball you could feel the angles lining up, hips opening in his final strides as he met the ball and sent it back into the far corner, low enough and hard enough to evade a slightly weak palm from Gianluigi Donnarumma.

At which point the air just seemed to leave the stadium. A game PSG had been winning, and winning in complex ways, taking the ball, closing the space down, finding ways to turn Liverpool’s defence, had disappeared like smoke.

Football is the most outcome-based of activities. Entire methods, storylines, acts of failure and glory are sent scrolling back out of some marginal details that really could go either way in the moment. This is its beauty, the reason why the argument is never settled, the game never done no matter how much money or data or peeled-eyeball attention is thrown at it.

It is in its own way reassuring in its refusal to be processed or controlled, a story of endless human variables. And sometimes you really do just need a good goalkeeper, the bit that makes all the other bits make sense.

Paris had been drenched in soft yellow light all day, even the ragged concrete fringes around the Parc Des Princes blooming with that lovely, hammy old Parisian spring. Both managers were out early on at the edge of their technical area, Luis Enrique in hoodie and urban cape, looking like a retired seven-times world skateboarding champion.

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His team were aggressive from the early moments, Khvicha Kvaratskhelia starting on the right. And for the opening hour here Liverpool just couldn’t contain him, their defence sliced open repeatedly by the Georgian, making his ninth appearance since a January transfer from Napoli.

This is the new PSG, a move away from the days of stars and bars, of Neymar riding a snow leopard around his personal sub-basement disco dressed in a solid gold bowler hat. But they can still afford to spend more than €50m on a bravura January signing.

As Vitinha and João Neves controlled the midfield, Kvaratskhelia began to shine. He is one of those players who just seems to bend the game to his will. He can stop instantly on the ball like a squirrel on a branch, anchored to the grass more effectively than anyone else around him.

PSG really could have scored three in that first half, Kvaratskhelia a constant sniping menace, socks down, shorts high, hair rumpled maverick-style, able to spring and snap to one side with a fierce fast-twitch energy.

The second half was tighter. Liverpool came out ready to grind and graft. Alisson seemed to feel it as the game went on, a footballer in one of those rare moments of invincibility. This was his night, and a huge step towards the season’s end.

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